Hello,
I'm new to the forum and new to Nisus. I am working as a research assistant, helping my professor a prepare a manuscript for publication. My professor's draft included Greek text entered with the SymbolGreek font. When I open up the file, the Greek text is rendered with a weird Latin alphabet and when I highlight the text, the formatting palette says the text is in SymbolGreek.

is it possible to convert this text back into Greek, preferably in a unicode-friendly font?

This is definitely possible to do using Nisus Writer Pro macros (Express macros won't cut it) and some careful work on your part.

As you might have guessed, the problem is that your font is using a non-standard text encoding. For example, a proper Unicode-aware font always shows a "b" character code as a "b" glyph on screen. But perhaps your special Greek font shows a "b" character code as a "β" glyph on screen. This works as long as you have the font installed, but if the font goes missing, or you transfer the document to a computer without the special font, what once displayed as a "β" now displays as a "b". This is not a great position to be in.

In order to convert text using these non-standard encodings you can provide a macro with a character encoding map. This map just tells the macro which glyph would be displayed for every character code used by the font. The macro handles the details of replacing all text using your special font with the proper Unicode characters. How to put together such a macro is explained in this forum post about Classic files (where non-standard text encodings was relatively common). You can use the same macro templates to put together a map for your Greek font.